


Loose Ends

by VaguelyDownwards



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-31
Updated: 2012-05-31
Packaged: 2017-11-06 09:31:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/417351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VaguelyDownwards/pseuds/VaguelyDownwards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim and Sherlock tie up the little details of planning their deaths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Before

“Sebby,” Jim says in that wheedling tone of voice that drives Sebastian mad, “what would you do if I died?” Sebastian is sitting at the coffee table in the living room of Jim’s ridiculous Conduit Street flat, meticulously dismantling his guns and cleaning them, inspecting the pieces for any signs of excessive wear. These guns are his life, and it doesn’t hurt to be too careful. Jim has decided to drape himself over the back of Sebastian’s chair like a cat (and it is _his_ chair, a hideous singed thing that he rescued from the burnt husk of his previous lodgings specifically because he knew it was fundamentally incapable of matching any room ever furnished), arms dangling limply around his neck.

“Fuck off,” says Sebastian, trying to focus on his guns with Jim’s arms in the way.

“But really, though. What d’you think?” He slides further down the back of the chair so that his head is nearly resting on Seb’s shoulder, prompting him to lean away and glare at Jim with disgust and annoyance.

“I’d go on fucking holiday, that’s what. God knows I’ve earned it.” He swats at Jim’s hands when they roam too close to his thighs or, God forbid, the more delicate mechanisms of the rifle he currently has in pieces on the table.

Jim lifts himself off the back of the chair with a disappointed sigh and stands beside him, brushing the wrinkles out of his suit. “You’re no fun,” he says. “Anyway, it’s a serious question.”

“And that’s a serious answer,” Sebastian replies. He sets down the part he had been cleaning and turns to face him. “What do you really expect? I’ve got about five dozen warrants out for my arrest. They’re putting up old timey Wild West posters with a sketch of my face and ‘Wanted: Dead or Alvie’ in curly letters. As soon as you kick the bucket, I’m taking that Swiss bank account number you think I haven’t found, shipping my best guns to a girl who’s still sweet on me, bless her, and catching the first plane out of the country.”

Jim nods soberly. “Fair enough,” he says. “Where to?”

“India,” says Sebastian, and he smiles as he thinks about it. “There’s a little half-native boy there who should be old enough to start shooting by now, and I hear Kali’s Kitten had a nasty litter of her own before I finished her off.” His fingers twitch, like he’s already hunting tigers in his mind.

For a moment, it looks like Jim is taking all this to heart, like he’s quietly moved by Sebastian’s simple desires for a gun in his hands and a girl in his bed. Then he rolls his eyes at him, says, “You’re so full of nonsense, Sebastian,” and plants a disdainful shove on his shoulder. As he saunters from the room, Seb looks for something heavy to throw at him.

—————

“Where are my guns?” Sebastian snarls. Jim is lounging in Sebastian’s chair, _his_ chair, somehow making it look less like a badly singed jumble sale reject and more like a throne. He doesn’t even look at Sebastian, absorbed as he is in the apparently fascinating task of filing his nails. “My guns,” Sebastian repeats, “Where are they? What have you done with them?”

Jim finally looks up at him and sighs. “They’re somewhere safe, alright? You only need the one for this job. You know, Seb, sometimes it’s like you don’t even trust me. It’s very hurtful.”

“This?” he says, and holds up the only piece of weaponry he could find in the room he used to think of as the armory. It’s an aging sniper rifle that can only be described as serviceable at best. The most charitable thing he can say about it is that the scope has been recently replaced, so he’ll at least be able to see his target, but it’s not like he’ll be able to hit it at any significant distance. “I am not taking the blame if I miss my shot because you decided to outfit me with Tinker Toys.”

“If everything goes according to plan— which it will— then you won’t need to shoot. You’re strictly backup this round. You know the game; I’ve already told you this. Your job is to keep watch and tell the others when to stand down.”

“You really think he’ll jump?” Sebastian asks, still dubious of every plan Jim gives him.

“I know he will. Trust me, Sebby, he’ll have to. The only time he’s ever solved one of my little riddles is when I let him. He’ll have no way out of this one.”

“So after he jumps, what’s to stop me from letting the boys take out their marks? None off them are any use without Holmes.”

Jim shakes his head and smiles at him with unnerving fondness. “Oh, Sebastian. This is why I play the game, not you.”

—————

Sebastian complains all the way to his assigned position. Some of it’s out loud, aimed at his unfeeling employer. As he gets closer to his destination, he moves to a whisper, then to silence, mentally listing all the things he sees as horribly flawed in Jim’s brilliant plan. Well, what he knows of it, anyway. Bastard won’t tell him anything useful.

As he crouches down on the rooftop and stretches out behind his faulty rifle, he feels something in his jacket pocket press against his chest. Odd. He doesn’t keep anything in that pocket usually. He takes his eyes off the sensational dance of enemy geniuses on the roof of St. Bart’s to fish it out.

There are several things there, actually. There’s a slip of paper with a very long number and a name he doesn’t recognize, both written in Jim’s precise handwriting. A passport with Sebastian’s picture and the same name as the paper. A handful of plane tickets that will lead him on a circuitous path to Indira Gandhi International Airport, passing through a small island nation with notoriously bad recordkeeping when it comes to particularly wealthy travelers. The first plane takes off in a few hours. He’s still sifting through it all when he hears the shot, and he understands why Jim gave him a gun he couldn’t possibly rely on.


	2. After

Sherlock sits up on the exam table and mops the blood off his face while Molly watches with an uncomfortable expression. “Now what?” she says softly.

“Best you don’t know. You could still be a target.” There is the slightest hint of concern in his voice, as if the shaky comedown from the adrenaline high has cracked his protective shell, but only just.

“Um,” says Molly, and shuffles her feet. “Is there anything, you know. Anything else I can do?”

He laughs mirthlessly, a dead, slightly manic sound that echoes around the cold walls of the morgue. “No, no, you’ve already done too much. He’d probably kill you if he found out. If, you know, he was still alive.” He lets out a slow breath and adds, “Some of his network might still try.”

“Are you sure he’s really dead?”

Sherlock nods, but he looks distracted. “He put a gun in his mouth and fired. I’m not a doctor, but I’m reasonably certain that’s usually fatal.”

“You jumped off a four story building,” she reminds him. “And did a pretty good impression of a dead man.”

“I had help,” says Sherlock, and he meets her eyes with a significant look. It’s probably the closest he’ll ever get to sincerely thanking her. There was a time when she would do anything for him to look at her like that, and now that the moment has arrived, all she can think of is how much she wishes things were different.

He shrugs out of his iconic coat and slides off the exam table. The coat will have to stay, he notes sadly. Scarf, too. They’re both stained with the blood Molly drew from him earlier. He can feel a wet patch between his shoulders, so he strips off the shirt for good measure. He’s still a bit dizzy, and he vaguely hears Molly cautioning him that he’s been under quite a lot of stress, and that he’d insisted that she draw more than she’d usually recommend. There is a rather grisly puddle on the pavement outside Bart’s, after all, if it hasn’t been cleaned up already.

He tips forward, and she catches him. This was never how she wanted him to fall into her arms. She helps him regain his balance, and mentally congratulates herself on simply blushing at the proximity of quite a bit of bare skin. She can’t even bring herself to make a lighthearted joke at the intimacy of the situation— the two of them, alone in a deserted morgue, and him already half-undressed. Those sorts of things always come out wrong when she tries to say them, and it’s not the sort of joke he’d appreciate.

Sherlock follows her eyes and cracks a tiny, genuine smile. “There’s not time, anyway,” he says seriously, straightening back up without her support. “I’ve got to be going.”

“I didn’t—” she starts to say, but it comes out as a squeak. He gives her a knowing look.

“Take care of yourself, Molly Hooper,” he says, because Sherlock Holmes is incapable of saying things like ‘I care about you, too.’ He plucks her spare lab coat from where it’s hanging on the wall and strides confidently to the exit. “And keep an eye on John for me, will you?”

—————

She can’t explain to anyone how she knows there’s a body on the roof, so it’s several hours before they wheel Moriarty’s remains into the room. An unfamiliar policeman, not Lestrade, is upstairs somewhere with the poor guy who discovered the body, a young janitor who’d crept up to the roof for a discreet smoke. A shockingly expensive handgun is tagged as evidence, pried from Moriarty’s cold, dead fingers and secreted away with a plethora of other things filed under Brook comma Richard.

It’s funny. She’d had to pull quite a few strings very carefully to have the morgue to herself without arousing suspicion for Sherlock’s post-mortem. When Moriarty arrives, however, one of her coworkers squeezes her shoulder comfortingly and makes deliberate eye contact before leaving. The body’s name on the paperwork is in scare quotes. She realizes with a start that they haven’t forgotten that before he was out-of-work actor Richard Brook, before he was criminal mastermind Moriarty, he was Jim from IT, and her boyfriend, however briefly. They’re giving her a chance to find closure. It’s a sweet thought, despite being horribly misguided.

Perhaps she does need closure, though, of a sort. After all, this is the man who insinuated his way into her home, and then threatened to blow up her friends. To call it traumatizing would be an understatement. Knowing she had been alone in close quarters with a man who orchestrated murder at wholesale prices. She had trusted him. It’s a weight off her shoulders to see him now, pale on the exame table, dead by injuries that so closely mirror Sherlock’s fake ones.

She laughs at the sight of him, helpless and harmless at last. It’s a high, nervous sound at first, but it gives way to the full laughter of honest relief. She runs gloved fingers through the thick blood matting his hair, and is surprised to find that his skull feels more or less intact. She’s seen gunshots to the head before, and they don’t feel like this. And his skin is unusually warm to the touch for someone who’s been dead for almost six hours, even lying on a rooftop in the sun…

Jim’s eyes flutter open and he smiles. “Hello, darling,” he says. “No kiss for your Sleeping Beauty?”

“You,” is the only word she can manage, and she pours into it every ounce of venom and loathing she has ever known.

Jim seems delighted by her anger. “My, aren’t we touchy. But it’s been a long day for you, hasn’t it? Your darling Sherlock… they say suicide is the hardest way to lose a loved one.” For one terrifying moment she’s afraid he knows, that Sherlock’s secret is already lost, but his smile is taunting her. He wants to see her cry for him. She’s stressed enough she might oblige him, but she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

Dropping the smile, he jumps from the exam table and pops open one of the coolers. He unzips the body bag to reveal a corpse dressed head to toetag like himself, except this one actually is missing the back of its skull. There’s a close enough resemblance between their faces to fool most people. Faces look different in death, anyway. “I even did your paperwork for you,” he says, retrieving a stack of hospital forms wrapped in plastic to keep off any stray bodily fluids. Molly can see the top page through the plastic. It looks like her handwriting, and the “Richard Brook” is not in quotes.

Moriarty pulls on a cloth cap that was stowed with the papers and the decoy body, more or less covering the blood on his head. “Finish things up for me, won’t you? Oh, don’t be stupid, of course I have people here. How do you think I got him in here to begin with?” He nods at his dead doppelganger. “So be a good girl and do your job, and don’t even think of running to your favorite detective inspector, or I’ll forcefeed you little Toby. While he’s still alive. And I’ll come up with something even better for Lestrade.”

Molly can’t speak for fear she will give yourself away. She is determined to keep Sherlock’s secret, whatever else may come of the interaction. She watches Moriarty walk away whistling, counting down the seconds until she can let go. The door swings shut behind him, and she collapses against the wall with a ragged gasp.

She hands in her two weeks notice on her way out. Her superiors are all surprised; she’s been the perfect employee. She can’t explain to them why she is sick of working with people who aren’t dead.

—————

Molly finds the woman under the bridge like Sherlock taught her. “Alms for the poor?” she says in a thin voice. She looks like she’s lived most of her life only a few meals away from starvation, but the look she gives Molly is one of pity. “I can’t take you to him,” she says.

“I know,” says Molly. “I just wanted to give you this. It’s only twenty quid, it’s all I had, but it’s… it’s something.” She wants to explain that she’s just quit her job, that she didn’t have any other cash on her, that she was in too much of a hurry to pull more money, but the woman under the bridge has been listening to these excuses all her life.

She smiles at Molly, and it’s like being smiled at by a child, an unconditional benevolence. “Don’t worry, love, he’s taken care of it.”

“You’ll, uh, make sure he gets it, then? Not the money, but you know.” He hadn’t explained very well to Molly how it worked, and she is beginning to have her doubts.

“Of course, love. Best you run along now.” Molly nods, and stammers out a thank you before hurrying home to hug her cat.

—————

The next morning, the sun rises on a fresh bit of vandalism on a part of Paris they don’t show to tourists. “HE LIVES,” it proclaims in enormous yellow letters. Nobody’s quite sure what to make of it. Almost nobody. At the same time, Jim is snug and content in a first class seat. He’s on a plane that’s just about to touch down in New Delhi, half a day ahead of Sebastian with his detours and layovers. There’s a woman expecting them both in a nearby village, and her son has keen eyes and a sharp tongue.


End file.
